China’s Famous Pallas’s Cat Meets Tragic End, But Leaves Legacy

Sun Simiao, the Pallas’s cat that became a star on Chinese social media, choked on a piece of chicken on October 10 and passed away, reads an obituary shared by Xining Wildlife Park.

The wild cat, rescued from someone’s home in the West China city of Xining in 2015, lived out the last of its years at Xining Wildlife Park and was the only (known) captive male Pallas’s cat in China.

San Simiao first caught netizens’ attention after a 4-second-long video of it copulating went viral. Audiences jokingly called the cat “four seconds(四秒),” which sounds like Simiao in Mandarin.

In 2021, Simiao’s ‘romantic episodes’ with another rescue resulted in the birth of a kitten — the first Pallas’s cat to have successfully been born in captivity.

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